Educating for Autonomy and Respect Or Educating for Christianity? the Case of the Georgia Bible Bills.

Journal of Thought 2010, Spring-Summer, 45, 1-2

Journal of Thought

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Description

Conscientious citizens should be wary of another approach to reintroducing the Bible in public schools. This approach seeks to implement Bible courses in the context of world religions; subjecting the Bible to inter-faith criticism, judging it by group consensus, and molding it to fit politically correct standards. Such courses tend to promote faiths such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. While these courses are also legal, they teach comparable religions rather than a true Bible curriculum. (National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, 2006) Many philosophers of education (Feinberg, 2006; Kunzman, 2006; Noddings, 1993; Nord, 1995) (1) have made strong arguments for including more religion in the public sphere. Others, like sociologist Robert Wuthnow (2005) of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion, have made more subtle arguments that public schools must be more hospitable to religious studies because our society is grossly ignorant of the religious other. Religious illiteracy is, in short, being recognized more and more as a public problem that public schools ought to address. Ignorance of the religious other can lead not only to everyday misunderstandings, but to more harmful acts such as in the days after September 11, 2001, a Sikh in Texas was murdered, assumed to be a Middle Eastern terrorist because of how he looked and dressed. However, even if we agree that ignorance of the religious other is harmful to a liberal, pluralistic state, it is not at all clear what it means to address this ignorance in public schools. In fact, once we begin to get more specific about teaching religion (about religion, religious studies), things get much more complicated. After all, to teach religion in the public schools is not necessarily to teach "a true Bible curriculum."